A little film about Bruce Conner and the making of a promo film for Toni Basil's 1966 single "Breakaway" (which is apparently a Northern Soul classic)
Toni Basil, genius choreographer, had another intersection with the avant-garde - her work with a bodybopping crew called The Electric Boogaloos influenced Byrne & Eno in the early stages of My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
Byrne - who dated Basil for a while - told me that initially he and Eno imagined the music as the soundtrack to a film she was making with the dance troupe.
I tried to interview Toni when I did the big piece on Eno and his New York years but no luck.
Here's a whole BBC special of avant-tinged dance fun she did in the 1980s
Here's her video album which starts with a fun Noo Wavey version of Bacharach + David's "My Little Red Book" as also covered by Love
Of course mostly she is known for this
Is "Mickey" - the intro at least - part of the continuum of Diddleybeat?
I suppose it's more rightly considered a post-"My Sharona" move
And a kind of jock jam - or jill jam.
Farfisa-y - could not be more Noo Wave really
More Boogaloo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3JxiB4FLjU
ReplyDeleteAh, it's a cover.
DeleteIt feels prototypical - like the prototype model - in the exact same way that Arrows' "I Love Rock and Roll" is vis-a-vis Joan Jett's "I Love Rock and Roll". The later American girl version completes and surpasses the original.
Basil was one of those people who hung out on the fringes of showbiz/LA subcultures for decades, to the point where some kind of fluke one-hit-wonder single was almost inevitable. She was in the background of a ton of movies (Davy Jones's dance partner in Head; Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Mother Jugs and Speed, Greaser's Palace...), she choreographed numbers on The Carol Burnett Show and the first season of SNL, and she was apparently the one who turned both Neil Young and Conner on to Devo circa 1977
ReplyDeleteIt's an impressive career - almost Zelig-like quality of popping up all over the place in interesting moments.
DeleteBTW, one for your New Wave study: a head on collision between it and AOR you might be familiar with, but with an ultracheap early video I certainly didn't know about, with a brazen attempt at copping the neo-Buddy Holly dorkcore that Costello, Mothersbaugh, and Ocasek were doing: https://youtu.be/Rh5kuxnDUc8
ReplyDeleteDid not know that - ghastly convergence of Bad Company / Foreigner type clean-rock with Cars-y Noo Wave tinges.
DeleteBuddy Holly dorkcore - there's a continuum there.
In a really literal way, Marshall Crenshaw (I met him once when he - surprisingly - was in a reunion-tour version of MC5 playing in Brazil. The singer in Mudhoney was also in it. An odd conglomerate with at least two roles in the band supplied by prosthetic implants. Could be that Wayne Kramer was the original member left).
Weezer (perhaps I'm only thinking that cos of the song "Buddy Holly").
There was a horribly pedestrian group on Stiff called Any Trouble who got their deal through winning a competition I think. Thad that vibe but maybe I'm only thinking that cos the singer had spectacles. Four-eyed rock. Mind you, their album title Where Are All the Nice Girls? gives off that dork-core loser-in-love vibe, the special tang of bitterness towards Womankind you get in Costello and Graham Parker.
The apogee of that kind of sexual jealousy was this:
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDG6MQkzh1o
The worst kind of psychological state that you can get yourself in without drug assistance.
I was thinking of including Joe Jackson in this lineage - he wasn't four-eyed but he did have the prematurely hair receding thing.
DeleteIt's a great song though isn't it. As is "It's Different For Girls" and "Stepping Out".
Graham Parker and the Rumour's "Local Girls" is a classic example - "don't bother with the local girls" because they are all dating soldiers from the local army camp.
I just saw on the same album Joe Jackson has a song called "Happy Loving Couples" - "happy couples ain't no friends of mine"
DeleteI actually had the Look Sharp! album and it was indeed very enjoyable - very clean and crisp, but really it's a fully grown man expressing the emotions of a 15 year old.
DeleteThe Stepping Out era is genuinely marvelous, though.
Weezer definitely counts. And the sexual jealousy anger is a huge undercurrent in most of it - at best, it's self-parodic like Jackson's, sort of like that Crumb panel of him angrily wondering why girls won't give him a chance, annotated with a half dozen boxes with arrows pointing out his various physical and emotional flaws; at worst, it's entirely sincere proto-incel-ism
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